IF THE fallout from Monday night's Four Corners report revisiting Julia Gillard's 2010 seizure of the prime ministership proves anything, it's this: where conflicting political ambitions are involved, there's rarely, if ever, going to be a single, convincing narrative.

The Prime Minister says she cannot recall seeing special polling containing devastating findings for Kevin Rudd before she confronted him and told him she would challenge him in the caucus. Perhaps her memory is hazy, but she definitely was in possession of the polling on the day before she advised Rudd of her challenge. She showed it to colleagues.

The context in which she was showing it to these colleagues was not ''how can we save Kevin?'', it was ''look at this''. Gillard insists she did not commit to challenging Rudd until the day she challenged him. She could be telling the truth. It's not hard to make the argument that a challenge isn't real until it's issued. All the same, to accept this entirely we have to believe that the caucus votes amassed on her behalf prior to her decision - her backers stopped counting after they got to 80 - and the victory speech written ahead of time by her staff came about via telepathy or perhaps divine intervention.

Is any of this vitally important to the running of the nation, a point upon which great policy matters turn? No. Rudd ran off the rails in his final six months as prime minister, an important segment of the community appeared to have lost confidence in him, he proferred no good ideas about how to arrest his slide, Gillard saw an opportunity to take his job and she did. It's done.

Advertisement

The way in which it does matter is that politically the shift to Gillard hasn't worked and as a result most members of her government were contemplating the future of her leadership this week. They will continue to contemplate it next week and beyond. This will go on until there is a vote in the party room. Gillard pledged, on the day she became PM, to restore the fortunes of ''a good government that had lost its way''. Instead, she has taken Labor into minority government and then presided over the most disastrous collapse in the ALP's standing since the 1950s split. She is highly unpopular in the electorate. You can be certain that if focus group polling of the type that helped to bury Rudd as PM 20 months ago was conducted about the PM now, the findings for Gillard would be toxic.

Gillard has a credibility problem with most voters. She is seen as neither truthful nor trustworthy. This week's back-and-forth about the details of her 2010 assault on Rudd did nothing to help her on that score. Gillard's fall in public support began with her move on Rudd, implanting a new scepticism about her personality and character within the mind of the electorate. Before then, she had a reputation for strength and integrity.

What preoccupies most Labor MPs now, with only 18 or 19 months to go before the next election, is what they hear every time they talk to their electors or see when they look at an opinion poll: an imminent, catastrophic defeat for the government. The conventional measurement of a marginal seat has been anything held by less than 5 per cent. A Labor marginal now could be defined as anything under 10 per cent.

Last year, as the pursuit of a carbon tax agreement ate away at Labor's popularity, MPs were assured that once a policy was finalised, the decline would be arrested. When that didn't happen, the next line of reassurance related to getting the carbon tax legislation through Parliament. The legislation went through, with no improvement for the government.

Few caucus members now expect the introduction of the carbon price on July 1 - which MPs once hoped would be a light-bulb moment that showed voters the tax was not a blight on their lives - to change public perceptions. To be precise, they believe it might help the government but nowhere near enough.

And you'll have to search pretty thoroughly through the caucus to find any member who seriously believes the government in its current form, with Gillard as the Prime Minister, can hold on to office at the next election. That's not to say that many MPs don't want to stick with her. Their reasons for doing so vary - loyalty, an ineradicable dislike of Rudd, reliance on the status quo in a confusing situation, and in a few cases possibly unjustified fear of factional retribution if they switch to Rudd.

On the last point, factional solidarity is not what it used to be within the Labor Party. Caucus members generally do not vote en bloc in the way that they did as recently as 10 years ago, so left-wingers will back people from the right and vice-versa. Probably the grouping with the tightest discipline is the one associated with the Australian Workers Union, which will not have a bar of Rudd.

On the question of retribution, given the imminent obliteration of so many Labor MPs, it's worth recalling Samuel Johnson's quip: ''When a man knows he is to be hanged … it concentrates his mind wonderfully.'' This is why the numbers in the caucus are potentially so dynamic.

There have been all manner of reports in the media about how many votes Rudd and Gillard command respectively in the 103-member caucus. What you can use as money is the knowledge that each side will oversell its own support and undersell its opponent's position. Neither Rudd nor Gillard has made a phone call seeking support. But they have had colleagues seeking them out.

With each bad opinion poll and the existential fear those polls engender among MPs, the momentum is with Rudd. It has not yet reached the point where it is unstoppable, as the move to Gillard was on that night in June 2010, but it is there. Last week, Treasurer Wayne Swan described reports of leadership tensions as bizarre and Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten said the whole thing was a hoax. Gillard's defenders are certainly investing a lot of energy in trying to stymie a hoax.

Rudd's backers this week were trying to sell a message of hope to colleagues who wanted to talk about the leadership. They argue that under Rudd there is still a chance that Labor could win next year and that Gillard's removal would provide such a jolt to public opinion, making Labor consistently competitive in the polls, that it could renew pressure on Liberal leader Tony Abbott, bringing Malcolm Turnbull into the equation.

Away from the febrile atmosphere of Parliament House, this seems very much a best-case scenario from a Labor point of view. But it demonstrates how far advanced Labor's leadership discussions are.

There is no turning back from here. The situation is unsustainable and it will have to be resolved with a ballot. The assumption that nothing can happen before the March 24 Queensland election is false. The showdown could take place either side of that date. There are still three parliamentary sitting weeks before then and if the chatter among Labor MPs this week is any guide, they do not feel that they have much more time to lose before the government sorts this out.

How the ballot comes about, through the actions of either Gillard or Rudd - neither of whom want to issue a direct challenge - or sparked by an event, is the missing piece in the puzzle.